The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) is a free, online collaborative encyclopedia intended to document all of the 1.9 million livingspecies known to science. It is compiled from existing databases and from contributions by experts and non-experts throughout the world.[2] It aims to build one "infinitely expandable" page for each species, including video, sound, images, graphics, as well as text.[3] In addition, the Encyclopedia incorporates content from the Biodiversity Heritage Library, which digitizes millions of pages of printed literature from the world's major natural history libraries. The project was initially backed by a US$50 million funding commitment, led by the MacArthur Foundation and the Sloan Foundation, who provided US$20 million and US$5 million, respectively. The additional US$25 million came from five cornerstone institutions—the Field Museum, Harvard University, the Marine Biological Laboratory, the Missouri Botanical Garden, and the Smithsonian Institution. The project was initially led by Jim Edwards[4] and the development team by David Patterson. Today, participating institutions and individual donors continue to support EOL through financial contributions.

Contents

Overview

EOL went live on 26 February 2008 with 30,000 entries.[5] The site immediately proved to be extremely popular, and temporarily had to revert to demonstration pages for two days when it was overrun by traffic from over 11 million views it received.[6]

The site relaunched on 5 September 2011 with a redesigned interface and tools.[7] The new version – referred to as EOLv2 – was developed in response to requests from the general public, citizen scientists, educators and professional biologists for a site that was more engaging, accessible and personal. EOLv2 is redesigned to enhance usability and encourage contributions and interactions among users. The product is also internationalized with interfaces provided for English, German, Spanish, French, Galician, Serbian, Macedonian, Arabic, Chinese, Korean and Ukrainian language speakers. On 16 January 2014, EOL launched TraitBank, a searchable, open digital repository for organism traits, measurements, interactions and other facts for all taxa across the tree of life.[8]

Intention

Information about many species is already available from a variety of sources, in particular about the megafauna. Gathering currently available data on all 1.9 million species will take about 10 years.[11] As of September 2011, EOL had information on more than 700,000 species available, along with more than 600,000 photos and millions of pages of scanned literature.[12] The initiative relies on indexing information compiled by other efforts, including the Sp2000 and ITISCatalogue of Life, Fishbase and the Assembling Tree of Life project of NSF, AmphibiaWeb, Mushroom explorer, microscope, etc. The initial focus has been on living species but will later include extinct species. As the discovery of new species is expected to continue (the current rate is about 20,000 per year), the encyclopedia will grow continuously. As taxonomy finds new ways to include species discovered by molecular techniques, the rate of new species additions will increase – in particular in respect of the microbial work of (eu)bacteria, archaebacteria and viruses.

The goal of EOL is to serve as a resource for the general public, enthusiastic amateurs, educators, students and professional scientists from around the world.[2]

Resources and collaborations

The Encyclopedia of Life has content partners around the world who share information through the EOL platform,[13] including Wikipedia and Flickr.